Chapter Twelve
Twelve
There were good days, though, when few wounded came in and the sound of helicopters was far away; days when the nurses played games and read novels and wrote letters home and organized MEDCAP trips to local villages to offer medical services.
On bad days, Frankie heard the distinctive roar of the twin-engine Chinook helicopter, the workhorse behemoth that could hold more than two dozen injured, and knew trouble was on its way.
Sometimes the pushes were so intense, the numbers of incoming and their injuries so bad, that Frankie and Barb and Hap and the rest of the doctors and nurses worked for eighteen hours straight on both soldiers and civilians, with barely a break for food or drink.
Frankie had learned to think fast and move faster.
She could do more than she’d ever imagined; she could initiate a surgery or close a wound or put in a chest tube.
Hap trusted her with morphine administration and talked her through all of his surgeries, teaching her every step of the way.
And some of this took place under direct rocket attack and mandatory blackout conditions, in a pouring rain.
No sound of incoming choppers. No mortar attack. No red alert siren.
Quiet. Not even a sprinkling rain.
She reached for a mop, began to clean blood off the cement floor. It wasn’t her job, but she did it anyway. She was both dead on her feet and full of buzzing adrenaline.
She shoved the mop forward, through the blood, pushing it away. It slimed right back where it had been.
Hap entered the OR, nodded at the corpsman at the desk doing paperwork. He approached Frankie slowly, touched her shoulder. “You don’t need to mop, McGrath.”
He was giving her that look—she knew it now—sadness wrapped in compassion, wrapped in understanding. It was how they all looked at each other after a MASCAL, when all you could really count were the men you’d lost.
In the past ten days, most of them rainy, Frankie had spent well over a hundred hours across an operating table from this man.
She knew that he never sweated, no matter how hot it was or how tough the surgery was; she knew that in easy moments, he hummed “Ain’t That a Shame” under his breath, and in harder times, he made a clacking, angry sound in his jaw.
She knew he wore a wedding ring, and that he loved his wife and worried about his oldest son.
She also knew that he made the sign of the cross every time he finished a surgery, and that, like her, he wore a Saint Christopher medal next to his dog tags.
He smiled tiredly. “Get out of here, Frankie. I thought I heard dancing at the Park. Let off a little steam or you’re going to blow.”
Frankie knew he was right. She peeled off her gown and left the OR. At her hooch, she picked up clean clothes and a towel.
She took a shower in the dark, washed her hair, and dressed in a T-shirt and shorts. At her hooch, she traded her blood- and mud-stained sneakers for huaraches and headed to the Park, where the music of the Beatles greeted her.
She saw a trio of men standing over by the makeshift tiki bar, drinking and smoking. The stand of frayed banana trees rustled beside them. Tiki torches glowed yellow and sent a thread of black smoke into the night sky.
Barb sat in one of the beach chairs near the stereo setup, smoking a cigarette.
Frankie pulled up a chair, sat down beside her. A cardboard box, overturned and stained, created a coffee table that held a half-empty bottle of gin and an overflowing ashtray.
“You took a shower,” Barb said. “I hate that about you.”
“There was blood in my armpits. How the hell does that happen? And the water was cold. They should put that in the So You Want to Go to Pleiku brochure.”
“Let’s face it, you’ve got to be crazy to want to come here.”
Frankie reached for the pack of cigarettes and lit one up.
“We got mail today. My brother, Will, sent this,” Barb said, handing Frankie a Polaroid picture of thousands of people standing or seated on the ground, with the White House in the background. Someone held up an IMPEACH LBJ sign. Another sign read MY SON WAS KILLED IN VIETNAM. WHY ?
“Why indeed?” Frankie said, leaning back, trying to work a kink out of her neck.
“My mom sent me a newspaper article about a march in D.C. A hundred thousand protesters gathered at the Lincoln Memorial.”
Frankie didn’t know what to say about that or, really, what to think about it.
The world of hippies and protesters felt far, far away.
It had nothing to do with the guys dying over here.
Except that it did. The protests made them feel that their sacrifices meant nothing or, worse, that they were doing something wrong. “The world is upside down.”
“Yeah. No shit. I heard that Canada is demanding the U.S. stop bombing North Vietnam. Canada . You know you’re doing something wrong if you piss them off,” Barb said, exhaling smoke.
“Yeah.” The headline of the latest Stars and Stripes was IT’S ALMOST OVER. WINNING THE WAR.
But they’d been saying that since Finley had been killed. And look at all the deaths since then.
There was no winning in war. Not this war, anyway. There was just pain and death and destruction; good men coming home either broken beyond repair or in body bags, and bombs dropping on civilians, and a generation of children being orphaned.
How could all this death and destruction be the way to stop communism? How could America be doing the right thing, dropping all these bombs—many on villages full of the old and the young—and using napalm to burn whatever was left?
November 7, 1967
Dear Mom and Dad,
This is a bad night for me. I’m not even exactly sure why. Today was just another day at the 71st. Nothing particularly horrible.
God. I can’t believe I even wrote those words.
If I chose to describe a mass casualty, you’d be horrified.
I’m horrified, and I’m even more horrified that normally I can get through it.
Do I want to know how to see these things and still breathe and eat and drink and laugh and dance?
It feels obscene to have a life and yet, given what these soldiers give up for their country, for us, it feels obscene not to.
The fighting near Dak To has been devastating.
And it is not just American soldiers who are being killed.
The Vietnamese people are suffering and dying, too.
Men. Women. Children. Last week, an entire village was bombed and set on fire.
Why? Because no one really knows who the enemy is over here and our boys are being killed by jungle snipers and they’re jumpy as hell.
It’s dangerous to be scared all the time.
What a waste of life and promise it all is.
The only thing I know is that the soldiers—I used to think of them as my “boys” because they were so young.
But they are men, fighting for their country.
I want to help them. I’m trying not to think of anything else.
For a few, I’m the last American girl they will ever see, and that means something.
You wouldn’t believe how many want to take a picture with me before they leave.
You keep writing about war protests and flag burnings.
None of that is in the Stars and Stripes.
And Barb’s mom said Martin Luther King says this war is unjust. I’m starting to wonder about it myself.
But can’t they support the warriors and hate the war?
Our men are dying every day in service of their country. Doesn’t that matter anymore?
Much love,
F
PS. Send hand lotion, perfume, crème rinse, Polaroid film, and candles. The damn electricity is constantly going out.
A heat wave hit the Central Highlands in mid-November.
The ever-present mud dried out, turned into a fine red dust that coated everything, filled every breath, turned their tears red.
No matter how often Frankie placed a wet cloth across her brow, there was no getting rid of the dirt that stained the new creases in her forehead, settled in the lines that fanned out from her eyes, coated her teeth.
Fat red drops of sweat slid down the sides of her face and along her spine.
In its way, the heat was as demoralizing as the mud and the rain.
There was no sleeping in this heat, and that meant the Park was packed after work with people listening to American music, trying anything to ease the sharp edges of their war.
“Go, Frankie,” Hap said, taking her by the shoulders, turning her toward the doors of the OR. “Barb left an hour ago.”
Frankie nodded. Had she fallen asleep on her feet for a second? Too tired to argue, she pulled off her mask, scrubs, cap, and gloves, and tossed them away.
Outside, daylight.
She blinked, confused for a moment. What time was it? What day?
Move, Frankie.
She left the OR and stepped outside, onto the walkway; there were pods of people about, looking tired, not much talking going on, drifting in and out of the mess hall.
In front of the morgue, she saw a single litter, positioned between two sawhorses. Beside it was a stack of body bags.
She headed slowly toward the litter, drawn to the loneliness of the man lying there, hoping he hadn’t died alone out here. He was young—so young—and Black. He had one limb left—his right arm—and it hung limply over the side, his fingertips just inches above the bloody ground.
His youth upended her. She was twenty-one years old, and she felt ancient.
All these young men who’d come here, most of them by choice, being shot at, ripped apart, broken into pieces.
The majority were Black or Hispanic or poor, straight out of high school.
They didn’t have parents who could pull strings to get them out of service or into the National Guard, or college classes to keep them safe, or girls who would marry them.
Some volunteered just to choose the branch of service, rather than be shipped out in whatever service when their number came up.